key: cord-0888418-8nafx5qw
authors: Thompson, Robin N; Hill, Edward M; Gog, Julia R
title: SARS-CoV-2 incidence and vaccine escape
date: 2021-04-13
journal: Lancet Infect Dis
DOI: 10.1016/s1473-3099(21)00202-4
sha: 3f2e2f607c4718a671b07f080c668ab6623b0174
doc_id: 888418
cord_uid: 8nafx5qw

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In this Supplementary Material, we provide additional details about the approach used to generate the figure in the main text. We also present supplementary figures in which we consider the risk that a vaccine escape variant arises over a fixed time period of three months ( Fig S1) and demonstrate the robustness of our main conclusion to different assumed values of the per infection vaccine escape mutation probability,

The emergence of variants such as B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 in late 2020 in different geographical locations indicates that variants of concern can emerge even without vaccines 1 . This raises the possibility that vaccine escape could occur during any SARS-

To demonstrate the principle that higher case numbers lead to an increased risk of a vaccine escape mutant arising, we developed a simple model in which the per infection probability of vaccine escape is denoted by . If there have been infections up until time , the probability of a vaccine escape variant arising before that time is

In our analyses, we calculated the value of by multiplying the daily incidence by the number of days up until time .

To approximate the value of the per infection probability of vaccine escape, , we note that of the order of 5 million SARS-CoV-2 infections had occurred in the UK when the 

SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England